IESE Business School
Blogosphere
IESE Publishing
IESE Business School
Blogosphere
IESE Publishing
Español
Login
Español
KNOWLEDGE AREAS
Accounting and Control
Business Ethics and CSR
Corporate Governance
Decision Analysis
Economics
Entrepreneurship
Finance
Information Technologies
Innovation and Change
Knowledge and Communication
Leadership and People Management
Marketing
Service and Operations Management
Strategy
DOCUMENT TYPES
Research Papers
Cases
Articles and Opinion
Knowledge Exchange
Technical Notes
Books
Studies and Reports
Videos and Podcasts
Entrepreneurship
Unlock the potential of new technologies amid high uncertainty
A deliberate unbundling of what is unknown surrounding a new technology can help unleash its potential.
Sources of uncertainty include the emerging technology itself, its potential market applications and users, its ecosystem, as well as the right business model.
Employing a structured approach to unbundling and managing uncertainty helps to elevate the role that executives can play in sensing and seizing opportunities during periods of rapid change.
By
Thomas Klueter
New technologies have long been recognized as motors for economic growth. Yet emerging technologies also carry significant uncertainty regarding their economic potential.
Take autonomous vehicles as an example. Interest in self-driving cars has been increasing for nearly 20 years now. That interest has been accompanied by high expectations for commercialization by a diverse slate of major businesses -- including Google, Uber, General Motors and Tesla. However, the estimated timelines for commercialization have varied enormously: from under three years to several decades.
The case of driverless cars illustrates the difficulty managers have in foreseeing how and when a new technology might evolve and prosper. But by simply claiming that an emerging technology is accompanied by high uncertainty, we may limit the active role that managers can play in seizing an opportunity.
To have greater power in realizing tech opportunities, managers may use a structured approach in unbundling the sources of uncertainty. This includes a shift away from simply considering technological uncertainty (i.e., will the technology work?) to an explicit consideration of uncertainty regarding:
The market applications the technology can serve
The users adopting the technology
The ecosystem of activities that support the technology's commercialization
The business model with which the emerging technology is being commercialized
As demonstrated by my
research
with Rahul Kapoor, published in
Strategy Science
, if done correctly, this unbundling of uncertainty can help identify:
When new technologies will successfully emerge and evolve
How firms might be able to take advantage of the opportunities presented by these technologies
How such interactions may shape the resolution of uncertainty
The resources and coordination required for ensuring technological progress
In our research, looking at the emerging technologies of autonomous vehicles as well as gene therapy, we find that a structured unbundling of uncertainty leads to an examination of its sources and how these sources interact -- whether in a pooled, sequential or reciprocal way.
How can this unbundling help managers? By supporting the way managers 1)
sense
and 2)
seize
opportunities.
1. Sensing
involves the "filtering of technological, market, and competitive information from both inside and outside the enterprise, making sense of it, and figuring out implications for action."
Rigorously unbundling the sources of uncertainty and clarifying their interactions facilitates these processes by offering a structured approach toward identifying where uncertainty is high and which source may be the primary "bottleneck." It also considers a holistic set of factors behind an emerging technology's commercialization that can be easily communicated by managers.
2. Seizing
technological opportunities involves making strategic commitments, also supported by a structured approach. For example, in the case of a sequential interaction, the resource-allocation process follows a coordinated approach in which a firm first devotes resources to resolving uncertainty in one source and, depending on the resolution, then repeating the process on the next important source.
Overall, the proposed approach moves beyond the aggregate characterization of uncertainty surrounding an emerging technology as simply "high" to one of different sources of uncertainty and the potential interactions between them.
Innovation is too important to be hindered by uncertainty. A deliberate unbundling of what is unknown surrounding a new technology can unlock its immense potential.
A version of this article first appeared on Forbes.com under the headline: "
How Managers Can Unlock The Potential Of New Technologies
"
This article is based on:
Unlock the potential of new technologies amid high uncertainty
Year:
2021
Language:
English